I’ve finally decided to post about my in-progress timeline, which follows the development of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band (“KOCJB”) from 1917 through 1923, the year the band made 39 recordings which constitute “the first recordings of substance by an African-American jazz band [and] the most significant corpus of early recorded jazz” (Gene Anderson, U. Richmond).

While cornetist Joe “King” Oliver was an important pioneer of Hot Jazz in his own right, today he is remembered because his protégé was none other than Louis Armstrong, the most important (and best, IMO) musician of the “Jazz Age” (Armstrong’s period of seminal influence really extended from 1925 to 1935 or so, after which point his myriad innovations had been mostly incorporated into the Jazz landscape).

Armstrong played second cornet behind his mentor and idol Oliver from mid-1922 until August 1923 and on all 39 KOCJB records.

. . . there’s people all over the world, they like to hear that lead – ain’t no sense playing a hundred notes if one will do. Joe Oliver always used to say “Think about that lead.”
– Louis Armstrong on his 70th birthday
(paraphrased from Michael Steinman’s blog Jazz Lives)

Scholarly Sources
My current bibliography (to which I need to add Floyd Levin’s book Classic Jazz among others), is here.
There are many great Jazz History sites on the web. To the enthusiasts among you I would recommend browsing the British Doctor Jazz site and Christer Fellers’ collaborative archive about trombonist and bandleader Kid Ory, The Kid from LaPlace. You also might check out the seminal Red Hot Jazz Archive website (though not updated since 1997 or so).
the accompanying RedHotJazz listserv has a lot of great contributors who discuss both 1920s artists and recordings as well as the many modern musical artists whose music takes inspiration from the “Hot Jazz” era.

Technical Notes
The Javascript tool TimelineJS, built for journalists by Northwestern University’s Knight lab, is the platform used to build the KOCJB Timeline.

This KOCJB project is shelved right now as I’m focused on other projects.

The timeline communicates what I’m trying to accomplish, but it’s unfinished. I should redo the introduction, add more details about the band’s California trip from May 1921 to June 1922 (there’s a lot of information), and write and end summary. The visual style is inconsistent as well.

I expect to continue refining the timeline, though who knows what web platform it will be on in a decade.
Thanks to John McCusker, Gene Anderson, and the entire wonderful community of Hot Jazz enthusiasts.